Irresponsible forwarding under general inter-vehicle spacing distributions

Typically, vehicles in a self-organizing traffic in formation system distribute the information by rebroadcasting. Rebroadcasting results in redundant retransmission of the same information packet, leading to a useless occupation of the radio channel. Minimizing redundancy, while still guaranteeing complete reachability throughout the network, is a challenging task in multi-hop broadcasting. In our previous work, we introduced a new probabilistic-based broadcasting scheme, called Irresponsible Forwarding (IF), which could reduce the redundancy effectively. However, in the previous work, we only considered the scenario where the inter-vehicle spacing was exponentially distributed. In this paper, we generalize the concept of IF such that it can be applied to any inter-vehicle spacing distribution.